


dona eis requiem

by rhapsodies



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: M/M, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 09:09:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17978465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhapsodies/pseuds/rhapsodies
Summary: Jason’s been fighting for his life ever since he took his first breath; no wonder he doesn’t know any other way.





	dona eis requiem

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for violence, the off-screen death of a child, various issues relating to dying, and of course, everything about jason in general

 

 

When he was young, when he still lived with Papa and Mama (his real Mama, the woman who raised him and let him sit all pressed up against her side on Sunday mornings, only half-listening to the prayers), they’d told him how he’d been birthed still and how he’d been so silent, a tiny little thing born as quiet and blue as the sky. Mama had cried – although he guesses it was Sheila, really, not that it matters, not that she ever did him any good – and he’d laid there in the red-smeared bed, still slick with her blood until suddenly he’d sucked in his first, rattling breath and clawed his way into life. Even that, Jason had to fight for. It’s no wonder he doesn’t know any other way.

“My little miracle,” Mama had said sometimes, stroking back his hair. “We wanted you so badly, and so God gave you to us, and no one will take you away.”

Jason had wrapped his little arms around her. She’d felt so warm, then: so real, impossible to lose.

Of course, nothing ever turns out like that.

But he guesses it’s a mercy that she had died first, that she never saw what he turned into. Sometimes, he asks himself: if she was alive, could he still go to her? Kneel at her feet, let her see him still covered in someone else’s blood just as it was since the day he was born; let her place her hand on his head like a benediction?

No, he thinks. If she could see him now, he’d be nothing more than a stranger, a half-step out of the grave and running on stolen time, the way it’s always been. Perhaps it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Perhaps this is God’s hand, refusing to let him die because she’d wanted him so badly, intervened with the natural order of things. Nobody should have to tear through wood and soil and dirt, splitting their own fingers to the bone. Perhaps this is her final, loving gift to him.

Or: there is no forgiveness, no grand plan. Maybe he’s just shit out of luck.

\---

He watches from behind a coffee-shop window as a man shout something obscene to a skinny street-girl, hair hanging ratty over her face and her expression is so carefully blank. The glass is grimy, he notices, and remembers the proud cant to the man’s walk.

A half-hour later, Jason breaks the man’s collarbone. It shatters easily, crystalline and fragile.

“You’re insane,” gasps the man (name: unknown; unwanted, for the most part), and Jason thinks it over. He doesn’t know; it might be true.

Goes back to making him scream.

\---

The sky in this city is always damp-grey, hanging heavy over buildings straining too high. Some of spires get tangled in the smog cloud, depending on the season.

Jason fucking hates winter in Gotham. Fucking hates winter, generally. The air stings and the ground he walks on freezes through his boots and it feels a lot like cold compressed soil, pushing down on his desperate, scrabbling hands. It got into his mouth. He would find it under his nails afterwards, staggering somewhere (anywhere), out of his fucking mind.

he dreams it’s winter and his fingers are pulling apart earth

He wakes, breathless and choking. It’s the bed sheets he’s trapped under, and he shoves them away to stumble towards the dingy bathroom, kneeling down to retch into the toilet basin. The tiles are cool to his touch.

The watery sun has risen before he moves from the half crouch on the floor; he stretches, revelling in the burn in his muscles and the stiffness of his neck. It means –

\---

The news leaks out that the Boy Wonder is dead.

It’s old news, just spun a new way.

\---

“I’m sorry,” he says. He says it again, to get the feel of the words on his tongue. He can’t quite remember if he’s said them before, and meant them. The knowledge is a finger’s breadth out of reach.

The mirror in the motel room is grimy. Fits with the rest of the city, Jason reflects, and stares into his own eyes. Looks away, so he doesn’t have to see the green tint.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and wonders if they’ll know he’s lying.

\---

He makes it as far as the back door before turning back. No one would want his pity, he reckons. _Sorry your son died! Turns out you can’t even save the ones you do love!_

Besides, people always get ideas. Most parents are funny about their sons.

(of course, some parents lead to cavernous empty warehouses and metal bars and splattered blood and that’s, well – that’s whatever)

Instead, he watches from one of the windows. The shadows and the night rattle and whisper, and he knows them, so they cover him; Jason watches them all inside, wrapped in their love and their loss. Jason is no stranger to the way grief descends, suddenly and without warning. Losing people is one of the only things he’s any good at.

Jason stretches out the tension in his muscles, finds purchase on a ledge. Adjusts his radio signals. Listens.

The buzz of static never ends. They all grieve together: daughters and sons, stone-still statues. Jason isn’t one of them. While he sits (and they sit too, and the dead lie restless in cold winter soil), the rain breaks in a burst, pounding down on him while lightning streaks hot and white across the sky, and the water that comes smells of ozone and dirt.

He wonders if it rained like this when he went, too. His thoughts circle and circle and there are graves full of bones that do not make a sound.

\---

So, he’s angry. Who isn’t, these days?

\---

He stamps down on someone’s fingers and hears them scream like they’re down a tunnel. They’ve been in this brownstone office for two hours and fourteen minutes, and Jason can’t remember the guy’s face. It flickers in front of him, as fickle as memory and he reaches forward to ward it off.

“This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me,” the man snarls wetly, his mouth a gaping chasm, and the face stops flickering.

Lips pull back into a grin that’s more grimace. The skin pulls taut, colour leeching to blotchy white.

Jason doesn’t have a crowbar to hand. It’s a shame. He’d have liked the irony. “Don’t think so,” he replies, and swings the first punch. It connects with the wet sound of blood splattering and for once, it’s not his own.

He lets his arm rise and fall and rise and fall and there’s a soft whining in his ear but he doesn’t let it stop him. It’s been a while, he thinks, since he let anything stop him. He’s furious, blackly furious and he can _channel it_ , now he’s got somewhere to siphon all this corrosive rage to. There’s so much for him to be angry about, he thinks, that he doesn’t even know where to start.

 “Guess it hurt you more after all,” he breathes. Stands up straight – like a good soldier, he almost thinks, but the words blare _wrong wrong wrong_ in his mind so he tears them into ribbons.

The whining crescendos, and then it’s just an aching silence that’s just as deafening. He’s shaking, he realises, and falls to his knees in an inelegant sprawl. All of a sudden the mask is too tight, it’s stifling and crushing like six feet of packed soil and he opens his mouth to shout for help because someone will always come for help except –

No one does. It’s the law of the land. Jason Todd dies alone, and the soil pours in.

He comes to in the same slump, his fists wet and his throat burning. There’s a faceless body beside him; faceless now because the skin and flesh and cartilage is all punched in and running red, running man (and oh, Jason can run, flee with the best of them). Jason can’t remember doing it, but he guesses he must’ve. “Jason?” someone asks, quick and urgent and well, that’s just not right. The dead don’t talk.

“M’not dead,” he slurs. His voice is cracked and hoarse – his hands still shake. “Or not dead again, I guess.”

It’s not even fucking funny, and Dick tells him as much, peeling out of the far wall and moving into Jason’s line of sight. Apparently he collapsed. It’s all fucking awful, Jason thinks, because now he feels all of twelve again: young and weak and lost in Dick’s shadow. “I was knocked out?” he tries. His throat is dry, like sandpaper, but it’s better than the wetness of winter and he doesn’t want to think about that, so he doesn’t.

“Sure you were,” Dick agrees, and crouches so he can rest his hand on Jason’s back. Rubs a circle. Jason moves his hands to hide the shaking, because he’s making a fragile enough picture without it. Crosses his arms, hopes Dick hasn’t seen. “Need a ride back?”

Shakes his head.

Dick doesn’t look convinced, so Jason accepts the hand up, shivers where Dick’s fingers touch the inside of his wrist.

“There are way causes more lost causes around here than just me,” he drawls blandly, his hands trembling on the safety of his gun. “Why don’t you go and save them?”

And even as Dick leaves, side-stepping the wreckage Jason’s made with a soft sigh and a flinch, he smiles back at Jason. Jason’s pretty sure that Dick thinks everyone can be pulled back from the brink.

\---

There’s an explosion of scarring near his temple, and Jason doesn’t know where it’s from, who gave it to him, because he woke up today and it was _there_ , and it should’ve crushed his skull inwards but he’s still here, he always is –

Thinking about it for any longer makes his heart pound enough to hurt, unsettles him with its strangeness, so instead he smashes the mirror and then washes out the fresh cuts methodically, the dark blood trickling down the drain.

\---

When he dreams, he dreams desperately, the visions surreal and imbued with the clarity of his subconscious mind. Sometimes he’s running, his sides burning with the ache and so much soil underfoot, trapped under his nails and he keeps moving anyway, or

he’s digging, again, blood streaming down his fingers and his throat hurting with all the noise he’s been making but still nobody comes, and when he finally, _finally_ breaks free that grinning white face is waiting for him and it says, _Again!_ and pushes him back down, or he’s

in the Cave, Bruce watching him and wearing a fond expression that Jason doesn’t remember him ever wearing in life, and then the smile goes stiff and ugly but Jason doesn’t notice in time, still shouts, _This is the best day of my life_

or sometimes he’s with Mama, curled into her familiar body and smelling her favourite perfume, sitting close together in a half-collapsed church, and when she tells him that _you’re my miracle_ for the first time, he really believes her

It’s not the dreaming. It’s that he wakes up, every new room shrouded in the same darkness, and wishes that he never had.

\---

He’s in –

He can’t remember. He thinks it’s Madrid. He doesn’t know how he got here.

It’s warm. Someone in the café complains about the heat and the summer sweat sticking the clothes to their skin and –

Anything is better than the bite of winter.

(sometimes he wakes up and he doesn’t even know his own damn name)

\---

“You must be having some shitty nightmares,” whispers the woman who sleeps next to him in the youth hostel. He thinks he should apologise for waking her up, and he does. It feels hollow. He wonders at the sort of man he is (wonders if she knows he’s lying).

He knows that speaking lower makes for less noise than whispering.

He dreams in metallic greys and winter skies and the hard soil comes away in clumps but there’s always more of it.  
In his dreams, even the fire burns cold and then it tears him apart and he knows it was a dream because dreaming is how he knows he’s alive. That, and the bone deep rage.

(wonders again: what sort of man is he?)

In the morning, he finds a notebook with sloppy notes on a man who sells drugs to girls so he can sell their bodies and the anger flares and spikes.

In the afternoon, he binds the man to a chair and puts a bullet through his forehead. The dribble of blood from the entry wound is satisfying in a way he can’t explain, and he sits side by side with the cooling body while he cleans his gun. He isn’t sure how he knows what to do, but it’s good work for his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” he says to the dead man with the small seepage of blood and the words don’t sit well on his tongue.

\---

He knows how to press his foot down on a man’s neck so that it’ll snap.

He doesn’t wonder, anymore. He knows what sort of man he is.

\---

“Fuck,” Jason croaks, and rolls off the couch. His head pounds like the worst sort of hangover, and he must’ve been really gone last night because he doesn’t remember any of it, at all.

His temples throb. There’s a hollowness in his chest that he can’t identify.

“I can actually still smell alcohol on you,” Dick tells him. Of course it’s Dick. No one hangs on to a lost cause like the last Flying Grayson. On the list of _Things to Save,_ Dick probably has Jason pencilled in next to the Carolina parakeet: it’s not a wholly bad thought.

“Yeah?” Jason scowls, and walks on unsteady legs to where Dick is standing, arms crossed. “I can come closer, if you wanna make sure –”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Dick’s face swims in his eyes and the colours bleed out into nothing, into whiteness. “No,” Jason says, but his voice is weak and the hand he lifts to ward off the sight trembles.

Someone speaks. Dick calls his name but the rush of blood in Jason’s ears is too loud, crashing like the tide, and then Dick tells him that it’s gonna hurt Jason a lot more than it’ll hurt him and then the mottled white, mercifully, sinks into black.

He wakes up.  
Story of his life.

Dick’s face blurs and blends together before everything straightens itself out and Jason isn’t sure if he can feel his fingertips. At his side, Dick murmurs quiet nonsense that Jason does his level best to ignore. “M’fine,” he says, “not like I’m a fucking Victorian maiden, God. Must’ve still been drunk.”

Wonders if Dick knows he’s lying.

“That happened before?” Dick asks, frowning. His hair is inky black and looks soft; probably has some fancy organic conditioner. The sort Jason wouldn’t ever use, wouldn’t even think about buying.

Shrugging, Jason pulls himself up (when did he fall down?) and brushes the dust off his jeans. “Couple of times,” he lies. It’s becoming a pattern. “Not getting enough sleep.”

He can tell, just from the look on Dick’s face that it’s not working. Dick’s plenty smart. Jason’s gonna have to try harder, fake it a little bit better. Make it clearer that Jason Todd is not up for redemption.

It’s just, sometimes –

\---

There are times when he wakes up and he doesn’t remember his own name.

\---

He maps the city out beneath his feet. Walks along thin parapets and breathes in: focuses on every tremor, every millisecond where he feels like he might fall and break like a wave on the sidewalk below.

It’s fucked up, he thinks. It reminds him he’s alive, that he has something left to lose. Jason has a strangle-hold on the things that make him feel like a real boy, but the list isn’t all that long.

He drags in a breath of smoky air. “I’m not out to cause trouble,” he says. He knows Bruce is listening, somehow, ‘cause Bruce fucking hates mistakes and Jason is a walking-talking catastrophic failure, right here. “So you don’t have to keep an eye on me. I’m playing nice, I promise.”

There’s a ripple in the shadow of a building where two walls meet. Or maybe there isn’t: Jason doesn’t know what to trust, these days.

He tips two fingers out from his forehead and takes his leave.

\---

One day, Dick drops outta the sky in front of him and Jason can’t properly recall his name until five hours later. If he thinks too hard on it, he starts to shake the hell out of his skin, so

he just doesn’t.

\---

So there are a few things he doesn’t want to think about. He hears that dying will do that to a guy.

“Jason Peter Todd,” he says theatrically, “and I’m the boy who can’t fucking stay dead. Figures, right?”

His empty room is non-responsive. It’s not big (damp and rotting motel rooms never are, not in this side of Gotham and maybe not anywhere) but suddenly it’s gaping and monstrous. Maybe he’s spending too much time with himself. Christ. “Don’t even start,” he says to the tatty covers on the bed, sinking further into the chair and searching himself for a pack of smokes.

He’s on to his third when he hears: “Babs said you looked like you were getting old but, shit, I didn’t think it was true.”

He’s only given a second to panic before he’s out of the chair, knife sliding into his hot grip and grappling, uselessly, until he’s pinned on the floor and spitting out blood.

Sighing, Dick tugs a hand through his sweaty hair and relaxes his hold. “Getting the memo. Don’t sneak up on the Red Hood, right.”

“Fucking asshole,” Jason spits back. He’s trembling hard enough that he can’t even sound mad anymore.

It doesn’t mean he’s not mad. Some things are worth being angry over, and Jason’s got a long list.

Without warning (guy never learns, Jason should teach him, but his eyes are prickling and it’s hard enough to keep his body tilted away), Dick’s got a hand on his back that’s touching him gently enough it’s as though he thinks Jason will break into a hundred, fucked up, little pieces. “Breathe, Jay,” he tells him, and Jason does, he can’t help it although God knows he’s tried. Dick starts up his familiar little commentary, all the stupid inane crap that never really helps, but hey, it probably makes Dick feel better.

 “What colour-” Jason starts, and spits out more blood. Sucks in a hoarse breath. “What colour was my bedroom?”

“Blue,” Dick replies, tilting his head to the side. “Why’d you ask?”

This is why Jason needs new playmates. The problem with Dick is he’s too smart and too trusting, and it’s gonna get him into shit, one day. “Just testing,” he grins, and it feels taut on his cheeks, butterflied at the edges, so he stops.

He can’t picture his old room at all. He’s decided not to think about it too hard because forgetting means he had something worth losing and losing means –

\---

There are days when he wonders if he’s just going crazy, after all. The clown might’ve finally learnt to play the long game; and _God_ , but sometimes there are days when he wishes –

\---

“Come to visit me _again?_ If I knew dying would make me so popular, I would’ve done it sooner.”

“Not funny, Jason.”

It is, a bit. Jason knows, knows it like he knows his own name, that someone’s going to make a joke out of it. It might as well be him. “Aren’t you supposed to be busy saving the world?” he asks, and takes a drink. Cheap stuff, from a dealer down near the Narrows, and it hits you like a blow to the face. He’s on the hunt, see, scenting out something to fill this awful, dark abyss inside of him _–_

“You haven’t been out all that much, either,” Dick says, and takes the prime seat on the bed. It’s no better than the one in the last shithouse motel, with the springs ripping out of the mattress. It’s why Jason keeps to the chair.

Frowns. “Yeah, I have,” and stops. He can’t remember last time he went out in the hood, but he’s been taking a break. “I’m going out in a bit.” He decides, and looks at the muddy-brown bottle he’s holding on to. “Or tomorrow.”

Dick jerks his chin towards the bottle and his mouth thins. “You’ll be falling down drunk for the next week or two, maybe.”

“Piss off, Dickie,” he says, and suddenly gets the ridiculous feeling that this is why Dick comes over, that he’s pleased when Jason acts like this.

He lights a cigarette, and the first couple of drags stop the twitching of his fingers. Panic and concealment; the cycle of it is devouring him. If he tries hard enough, he can sense Dick stressing that Jason’s got enough of the good stuff in him that he’ll implode in a mass of blood and flesh and bone. It’s not a terrifying prospect, he realises, and takes another drag.

“Hear you lost the kid,” he says bleakly and too-late. Spits up the words and tries to _feel_ , be something more than a rotting corpse with a grin. “I’m – sorry.”

There’s nothing left to wonder about. Dick’s shit-smart, and he knows a liar. “Me too,” Dick replies in a whisper, anyway (even if Jason’s a filthy dirty fraud who’s _got it coming for him, nasty shitter thinks he’s smart but them smart ass ones go get themselves killed, they all do in the end_ ), and shrugs. There’s not much else to say. Should fucking frame these hanging seconds, the ones where the both of them shut the hell up, but, hey. It’s introspective.

The both of them sit there passing the bottle until the shadows spill into the room like an oil slick. Legs folded up beneath him, propped up against the corner, Dick is like a ghost in the shadows, beginning to blur away. Without the lights on, the colour is beginning to bleed out and like this, Dick could be dead too.

Jason tries to pull out some other sympathy. _Damian was a good kid,_ he could try, because it’s true and they should’ve tried harder, maybe, to keep him safe, but nobody ever learns. _It gets better,_ or, _You won’t always feel like this,_ although neither are true at all. Everybody grieves differently and they all say it gets easier but for Jason it never does, time just keeps beating on and on and fucking on.

The walls are beginning to tilt crazily, with sickening vertigo.

He settles on: “You wanna talk about it?”

It’s obvious that Dick doesn’t but then Jason notices the shrieking, unchecked rasp of Dick’s breathing, the way his body is beginning to angle inwards and quiver, about to disintegrate.

“I just – I miss him, god, I miss him so _much._ ” Dick gasps the words out, his shoulders tensing, and Jason staggers over to push Dick’s head down between his knees. “I should’ve done more, I should’ve got him out of the way, or never taken him at all, and – it should’ve been me instead–”

Jason grips the back of Dick’s neck, splays his fingers either side. He can feel the pulse there. Carotid artery. Makes for a quick, clean kill. “Breathe,” he says, as gently as he can. Puts the bottle down. Everything feels like it’s happening in slow-motion; like a scene in some shitty movie, right before the building explodes and everyone dies.

Dick’s breathing doesn’t even out for a long time, not until the only light comes from yellowy streetlamps. He’s shaking, and when he looks up his cheeks are still damp, and Jason wonders distantly how this keeps happening, how so many kids can get ripped apart by this life before someone decides, _no more._ “Damian wouldn’t have wanted you to die for him. God knows he would’ve brought you back and killed you again himself, if you had.”

“I don’t care,” Dick says shakily. “I shouldn’t–”

Firmly, Jason tells him: “Don’t.”

Jason’s been through this, in the reverse: what if he’d let Sheila take the blast, instead of him, or what if Bruce had arrived in time, or what if he’d simply been a better fucking Robin?

“It doesn’t help,” he explains. “It’s an – unhealthy way of coping with grief.”

“You finally get a therapist?” Dick asks. Jason doesn’t answer, because Dick will know he’s lying. Under his fingertips, Dick’s blood sings, loud and strong.

Dick is staring blankly at the wall opposite. The wallpaper is peeling in the corner. Jesus, Jason stays in some shitholes. Slowly, two fingers against Dick’s jawline, Jason turns Dick to face him. Dick’s eyes are so wide, glossy and blue, as blue as a child born dead.

“It’s not your fault,” Jason tells him. Wonders idly if anyone had said the same, when it had been him.

Instead of saying anything, Dick leans forward and presses his mouth against Jason’s. Even like this, closed-mouthed, Jason can smell the shitty, cheap whiskey, overlayed with the salt-stink of crying. Dick’s skin, where it touches him, is warm.

Around them, the walls are beginning to fall away. They could be anywhere: the endless expanse of dark sky stretches out above them, shot through with stars. Jason turns his head, breathing against Dick’s cheek. “And they say _I’m_ the one with bad ideas.”

Dick shrugs a shoulder. Jason expected a sudden blossom of hurt, or anger, so he’s surprised when Dick just says, “You really kind of are.”

When Dick kisses him again, Jason brushes his fingers down to rest over the place in Dick’s neck where his blood beats the strongest. The human body is weak, here. Jason could raise his other hand, crush Dick’s windpipe with ease, let his fingers sink into the mess of wet, ruined flesh.

And then Dick pulls back, says, “I know I can’t protect you all. Our kind of life, someone has to get hurt, eventually, and I know I’m not half as strong as – most people, like us. But I-” he stops, swallows, and Jason feels the motion, “I’ve already lost you, and now Damian. I don’t think I can lose any more.”

“You didn’t lose me,” Jason points out, his voice rough-hewn. “I’m right here.”

“Are you?” Dick asks, which doesn’t make any sense, but then he moves in to kiss Jason again and Jason – gives in to it, turns it rough and messy, and it stings when someone cuts someone else’s lip, the blood making their mouths slide. One of Dick’s hands traces a path up Jason’s abdomen, coming to a pause over his ribs. Right above the blackness, where his heart should be. In retaliation, Jason gets his hands under Dick’s thighs and lifts him up, walking backwards towards the bed. “This is really stupid,” Jason says, when the backs of his knees make contact with the mattress. He turns them around, spreading Dick across the covers and trying to pin him with his weight; Dick shifts, his body blurring at the edges, when Jason skims his knuckles along his side. Dick’s heartbeat is a violent staccato beneath his skin, his body rising and falling with each breath and he’s staring up at Jason, the whites of his eyes gleaming.

Dick traces the knots and shines of the scar tissue that map across Jason’s body, and Jason bats his hand away, tries to roll them over but Dick’s body is suddenly steel and the two of them move in a sudden burst of anger. Dick’s knees slam into Jason’s side with bruising certainty, and Jason’s nails leave raised, pink lines along Dick’s back. Their mouths clash again, and Dick smells like smoke and grief – and finally, Dick is shuddering beneath him, his body strange and surreal in the slanting half-light and his blood pulsing like a wound.

When Jason wakes, the sun is beginning to split the sky in gold and red.

Dick is still sleeping. Jason isn’t sure this is real, but wants to pretend, so he carefully packs all of his things and slips away before the sky is light, before anyone knows he was even here. Right before he leaves, he stops at the door, and thinks: _turn around,_ so he does, and Dick isn’t sleeping anymore, even though Jason had moved in silence.

“Sick of me, already?” Dick asks. His eyes are distant. “I knew I should’ve made you buy me dinner first.”

Jason watches Dick push himself up. “You know I don’t have the money for that.”

“You could stay, if you want. You can come back with me.”

Jason is suddenly aware of the way the room is crooked, of the great swelling rush of white noise in his ears. It might’ve been like this the whole time. He doesn’t know, anymore. When he meets Dick’s eyes, the soft light streaming over his features, Dick is looking right at him, familiar and impossible.

“See you around,” Jason says, and lets the door slam closed.

\---

Jason hitches a ride on the monorail across town, his mouth tasting of copper and salt. He chooses the emptiest carriage, and no one looks at him when he leaves. He might not even be there at all. That same silence haunts him the rest of the way, smothering his footsteps as he crosses the grounds. He can’t remember if he thought of anything at all, the whole journey here. The newest stone in this cemetery is gleaming and sharp, a lonely silhouette cut against the white glare of the morning sun, but he moves past it: towards the older ones, where his name is still scratched in.

Someone told him, _this is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me,_ and that was true, but not in the way it was supposed to be: it never ends, any of it, this new life always finds some new way to crush him into the dirt and he knows, now, that he’ll never be free of it.

He stays there until the cold becomes biting and cruel. When he leaves, he doesn’t look back, and before him the entire city stretches out, a landscape he knows as well as he knows the back of his hand; he walks until it reaches up to cradle him, like a mother, until he's swallowed up into the dirty winter rain.

**Author's Note:**

> i found this half-finished when i was cleaning out an old folder earlier today (then titled 'raise your hand if you've ever been personally victimised by jason todd', ha) - i ended up liking it, so i cleaned it up, finished it, and any remaining mistakes can be directed to my 2014 self. it's nice to know that half a decade later, loving jason is still a brand. hello baby, i've missed you!


End file.
